How To Successfully Manage Fast Unexpected Changes

How To Successfully Manage Fast Unexpected Changes
The other fly in the petroleum jelly is the risk of a financial crackup such as Russia’s 1998 default. “You will always have financial risks associated with fast, unexpected changes,” says Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Oil’s Price...
Continue reading »
Change Management Team Management Change Management

Boy, Are You Behind The Times

Boy Are You Behind The Times
IT used to be sold to CIOs.  Now an employee adopts a piece of software and pushes his company to do the same. An Expense App to Hook Road Warriors, Bloomberg Businessweek, Dec 15, 2014. I had found a program called “Packrat” which was a...
Continue reading »
Change Management

Ya Gotta Know What Is Normal

Ya Gotta Know What Is Normal
The key was that I knew what was normal, what a typical project looked like, how the typical project would play out. This included all the typical problems that would go wrong. Most importantly I knew that given just enough time in the overall schedule, we would have the time to fix any issues.
Continue reading »
Metrics

Overcome The Culture

Overcome The Culture
At Jet, there will be no annual performance reviews, because [Marc] Lore thinks feedback should be immediate and civil.  … And Lore isn’t making any of his employees sign noncompetes; he says that … without such stipulations “there’s more loyalty and trust that is built.”...
Continue reading »
Change Management

Don’t Take Too Long

Don't Take Too Long
It is indeed ironic that Hadoop is picking up support in the general community about five years after Google moved on to better things. Hence, the rest of the world followed Google into Hadoop with a delay of most of a decade.  Google has long...
Continue reading »
Change Management

Lead, Follow Or Get Out Of The Way

Lead, Follow Or Get Out Of The Way
For advanced economies, innovation requires pushing on the frontiers of science and technology.  That can’t happen without heavy government funding for basic research … The Internet and the Global Positioning System (GPS) are only two of the crucial technologies that originated as projects of the...
Continue reading »
Change Management

The Power Behind The Power Of Positive Thinking

The Power Behind The Power Of Positive Thinking
According to neuroscientist Tali Sharot of University College, London, the group of people who turn out to be more accurate about predicting how long it will take to complete tasks — and how likely they are to succeed — are the clinically depressed. Optimists underestimate...
Continue reading »
Metrics Process Improvement Leadership

I Always Explained Why I Needed To Do It

I Always Explained Why I Needed To Do It
In my case, in 1999 I arrived in Japan and had to face the turnaround of Nissan. The fact that I wasn’t Japanese and was a newcomer to the industry helped me. People knew I wasn’t involved in the industry’s past. I dismantled keiretsu [interlinked...
Continue reading »
Communication

Lessons Learned From Fighting Ebola

Lessons Learned From Fighting Ebola
[Doctors Without Borders] is able to move so swiftly, in large part, because of its decentralized structure, which is more akin to a guerilla network than a top-down corporation. How To Manage A Plague, Bloomberg Businessweek, Nov 17, 2014. Contrary to such notable initiatives such...
Continue reading »
Management

It’s Simple, Just Look At The Results

Its Simple Just Look At The Results
“I was very worried when an insider was chosen as the new CEO. I was especially worried when suboptimal execution continued: missed delivery dates, buggy products, weak marketing.” The Rise And Fall of BlackBerry: An Oral History. Bloomberg Businessweek, Dec 9, 2013. The product looks...
Continue reading »
Tracking Honesty